News:

"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib said that bank executives were "greenwashing" their role in funding climate change on Wednesday.

The chief executives of Bank of America, BNY Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and State Street appeared together in front of Congress for the first time in 10 years to face questions from the House Committee on Financial Services. At the hearing, which discussed changes large banks had made since the financial collapse of 2008, Tlaib asked the CEOs if they would change bank behavior to address climate change.

The bank leaders said they had and continue to take action on climate change, leading Tlaib to respond: "Don't say that you're clean and sustainable financing because your companies' words are not consistent with your actions. I would call this gaslighting."

"But for the sake of this hearing, I'll say that you are greenwashing your own track record and duping the American people into believing that you are helping address climate change. On the record, will any of your banks make a commitment to phase out your investments in fossil fuels and dirty energy?"

Tlaib earlier told JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon that, "your bank alone has provided more than $195 billion in fossil fuel lending and underwriting over the past three years since signing of the Paris Climate agreement, making your bank the number funder of fossil fuels in the world."

She also said that 😈 Citigroup and 😈 Bank of America have provided over $100 billion each in fossil fuel funding in the last three years, making them, respectively, the third and fourth largest funders of 🦕🦖 fossil ☠️ fuels.

Posted by: AGelbert

The fossil fuel industry regularly deploys manipulative and dishonest tactics when engaging with communities of color, often working to co-opt the respect and authority of minority-led groups to serve corporate goals. A new report released by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) outlines the top 10 manipulation tactics that the group's members and partners routinely observe.

Posted by: AGelbert

Much better to suck off the centurions of the status quo. Let's never do anything, but clutch pearls and wring hands

.I'm not advocating for that either, but the inertia is so immense, the problem so multi-dimensional, that whatever explanation of the Situation you provide has to be unassailable TEFLON. Whatever you'll do will have to be done steadfastly with historically unheard of resolve.Gimmicks are prone to backfiring.

Then where to start? Young people, whose lives are in line to be trashed, have tried this gimmick to get the attention of term elders, who nod, smile, and get back to the Godswork of making their quarter.

I completely agree that the inertia is immense, and the forces of greed so richly and deeply arrayed as to make the effort seem futile. Which is right where they want ordinary people. throwing up our hands, sighing, and saying "what's the use?"

I wonder what "explanation of the cause" of anthropogenic climate change" could be made to your satisfaction?

What do you mean "you wonder" ? You're on the Doomstead Diner for crying out loud ! You know damn well the climate change issue isn't one to be looked at in isolation.You either give a proper assessment of the WHOLE BIG PICTURE to show you're TRULY COMPETENT ... or you PROVE that you're not by throwing a grab bag of progressive policies and throw them under the umbrella of a half assed Green New Deal ...

If we wait for that, we might as well go full trump. As it is, the debate seems to be, "here we dead in ten years or 100 years?"

Perhaps the "Green New Deal" is half-assed. At least it's a start. All you get from republicans (and the corpadems who love their donors) is some variant of "drill baby, drill."

but Ocasio-Cortez majored in international relations and economics at Boston University, graduating cum laude in 2011.

I've been reading about energy, economics and finance for over 13 years non stop now, and the time has long passed that such a resume would actually impress me.The truth is, a science and economics background should now be mandatory qualifications for any government leadership position in all advanced countries. The system is to complex now for overly ambitious lawyers, economist and 'social scientists' to have a go at demonstrating what 'Silo Thinking' can do for us...

You are taking my comment out of context. Citing AOC's credentials was not meant to impress you, but merely to reply to the fuckwit who described her as a "twit." If you have followed her work this far in the House, she's done a really good job in her public outings. Especially for a rookie. I was much impressed with how she spent her five minutes during the House Oversight Committee hearing. I think she will represent her district, and her generation , pretty well. Expect the republicans to richly fund Joe Crowley or some other opponent to get her removed in the next election. She poses far too much of a threat to the status quo, just by mentioning certain policy issues that were never to be spoken of publicly, lest we proles get our hopes up.

Well said, Surly. I admire your patience.

I briefly looked at this thread and my BS meter pegged the needle to the right (pun in tented ) when I noticed the continual pejorative front door (and back door) sniping at the Green New Deal in general, and AOC in particular, from this fine fellow you are patiently debating.

The bottom line for EVERYONE that posts on this forum should be, but rarely is, that NONE of us here will have BEANS to do with shaping the future of humanity, PERIOD.

I am pretty sick of reading hand wringing CRAP from closet (or open) status quo defenders about how ANY attempts at transitioning to a 100% Renewable Energy, decentralized, non-exportable green jobs type economy that cleans up the environment, and consequently improves the the health of we critters that live off the environment, are "not enough", so let's just "DO NOTHING", EXCEPT, OF COURSE, BAD MOUTH anyone like AOC that claims there ARE REAL WORLD SOLUTIONS (THAT DOOM THE FOSSIL FUEL "Industry").

The people out there on the (possibly, but not guaranteed) planet saver=social justice side like AOC, Greta Thunberg, etc. et al DAILY struggling against the "people " on the GUARANTEED planet killer side like Mitch McConnel, Rex Tillerson, Koch Brothers, Trump, etc. et al ARE the ONLY HOPE we have, PERIOD.

The POLLUTING INDUSTRY SUPPORTING people should be constantly exposed for their treachery and empathy deficit disordered immoral, biosphere exploiting world view.

Ridiculing those like AOC that propose REAL WORLD SOLUTIONS, which include taking the polluters to the bankuptcy woodshed, is not rational.

Praising the efforts of AOC, Greta Thunberg, etc. et al IS rational.

GO GET EM', AOC, Greta Thunberg and RATIONAL FRIENDS all over the planet!

Posted by: AGelbert

Back in November, Paul Krugman wrote a great column on “the depravity of climate denial,” comparing climate denial to the tobacco-cancer denial industry. Krugman concludes that climate denial is even worse than the tobacco industrial complex: cancer denial most impacted those who choose to smoke, he argues, whereas climate denial hurts us all.

And it’s not like those in denial have legitimate concerns. Krugman points out that “there are almost no good-faith climate-change deniers,” as they are really driven by sins of greed and ego. And because one political party appears beholden to this denial, he concludes that “Republicans don’t just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people.”

Krugman’s arguments were so upsetting it apparently took Canadian denial blogger Donna LaFramboise over a month to respond with a post of her own, decrying how Krugman’s disdain for deniers “is extreme prejudice” and “outright bigotry.”

“To be a climate skeptic,” LaFramboise 😈 concludes, “is to belong to a despised minority, one that respectable people think it’s OK to demonize.”

So sad.

On the same day LaFramboise posted her complaint about how respectable people treat deniers, one of the loudest and least respectable deniers wrote a post of his own. At Breitbart last week, James Delingpole wrote up a listicle of things he’d like to see more of in 2019. It’s pretty standard outrage clickbait: Delingpole laments that even conservative media fails to recognize that “Donald Trump is one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history.”

The real kicker, though, is the kicker: Delingpole’s “resolution this year is to be much more sexist.” According to Deli, sexism “is just a made-up leftist term designed to pathologise normal male behaviour.” “Girls are great,” Delingpole writes, “but as we’ve known since Genesis they do have a tendency to get out of hand if they’re either not watched carefully or overindulged.”

Right.

While clearly ridiculous, it's important we not forget that the axis of denial 🐉🦕😈🦖👹 operates on many fronts at once. Keeping women down means keeping the pro-fossil fuel status quo going. And keeping people of color--the real minorities whose struggle LaFramboise minimizes--from positions of power also serves to support the fossil-fuel status quo.

And the tools for doing so are basically the same. As American University’s Director of Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center Ibram Kendi wrote recently at the Atlantic, climate and racismdeniers are functionally quite similar.Both denyobservable, objective realityby framing the acceptance of climate science or acknowledgement of structural racism as a matter of opinion, which makes it difficult to hold those with different beliefs accountable. This line of reasoning what gives LaFramboise the cover to complain that deniers are reviled for simply believing something different. Therefore, one way to hold deniers accountable, Kendi argues, is by reframing questions to focus on knowledge rather than one person’s opinion--asking about the evidence of climate change rather than what a person believes about it, for instance, or what racism in action looks like rather than if someone believes a person is racist.

Fortunately, this tone-deaf blindness to reality and full immersion in their false but comforting beliefs can lead to some real own-goals. For example, a tweet (from a now-deleted account) with a video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing that was meant to be an attack on her character. Because apparently conservatives think (a young woman of color) dancing is bad, which AOC respond to by doing a little dance on her way into her new office in the House of Representatives.

Then in addition to having the gall to dance, in an interview Sunday she suggested taxing the rich at historically moderate rates to pay for climate action.

Rare is the political figure who's willing to be honest about the need to raise taxes instead of cutting them, but seems like the only thing AOC wants to cut is loose: footloose!

If you hang around intellectuals or academics long enough, one of them will make the joke that they wish they were conservative because there is a lot more money in it. Jordan Peterson is living proof of that.

The Koch Brothers and the Heritage Foundation are eager to fund and promote the brightest minds conservatism has to offer. They intend to use the free market language of the right, there is a high demand for “intellectuals” who will defend conservative ideas, but there is a very low supply.

So if you’re wondering how 55-year-old Canadian psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson became an overnight sensation, going from obscure academic to international bestseller lauded in the New York Times 👹 as “most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now,” you don’t have to look much further than that old academic joke.

Jordan Peterson is famous because in the era of the resurgent alt-right, the loose collection of conservatives that align with white supremacists, there are few intellectuals willing to align themselves with the movement. The alt-right is in need of intellectuals to justify their fascist worldview, and Peterson has been ready.

Agelbert NOTE: Jordan Peterson is a stalking horse for FASCISM. He enthusiastically supports the Koch Brothers push to get Trump and his wreckng crew to eliminate Social Security and Medicare.

Jordan Peterson is a Kochroach. He is a stalking horse apologist for empathy deficit disordered, might is right, Social Darwinism. Peterson is quite fond of Hitler's favorite "philosopher", Nietzsche 😈 , of the "Territorial Imperative" (BALONEY) and "man needs to become superman" infamy.

In short, this Peterson Canadian Climate Denying Kochroach is a defender of our present oligarchic civilization destroying status quo. 👎

In January, Peterson released 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos. Several hundred pages slimmer than his earlier work, the book mixes his ideas about masculinity, individualism, and mythic destiny with a self-help style manual for living.

12 Rules breaks up his long academic and philosophical digressions into chapters with titles fitting of a book like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, like “Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back” and “Be Precise In Your Speech.” With this book, Peterson rebranded as a kind of Malcolm Gladwell of the right, boiling down varied, complicated concepts into digestible chunks that support generally accepted ideas that he can then use to bolster his misogynistic, bigoted, reactionary worldview.

Posted by: AGelbert

No, it's not a lie. I still remember the thread where you went off on me for daring not to blindly believe your theories about ancient aliens and high-tech Atlantis type societies. What happened to all of those theories, AG? Did you finally realize it was all nonsense you were following because it sounded intellectual and made you feel superior to those without the secret "knowledge"?

Only among tarantulas could be it "trolling" or "sophistry" to simply be honest and admit you do not know something well enough to write intelligently about it. This is what you should be doing when it comes to a great many things you have written about, but wanna-be tyrants will never admit their intellectual blind spots and personal weaknesses.

If their is one thing you have NEVER done, it's "admit intellectual blind spots and weaknesses". You are always too busy inventing said "blind spots" and "weaknesses" in your perceived opponent. Disingenuous posturing does not qualify as an admission of ZIP, counselor.

Deny all you want and keep up the false accusations, as is your wont. I understand that "works for you" so you can avoid discussing the Climate Crises issue objectively. So, go head, continue keeping your Denier head firmly ensconced in your status quo worshipping descending colon. The fact that you consistently refuse to acknowledge the validity of the dire need for a worldwide effort to get the global economy off of fossil fuels (and other biosphere degrading human activities), to the point that you disingenuously claim that "tinkering" with this complex CAPITALIST system this way will "unjustly hurt the poor" (a Fossil Fuel Industry Propaganda Denier talking point for the last TWO decades, at least) means that you, like the others that cheerlead the status quo, have blood ☠️ on your hands. Those of us advocating a clean energy based economy for a viable biosphere, do not, despite your Orwellian attempts to demonize us.

Be sure and IGNORE the following post because, if you read it, it will make your head hurt.

Have a nice deluded day.

Climate Crisis Critical Issue in 2020 Elections – Jane Sanders

December 7, 2018

Jane Sanders tells Paul Jay that voters shouldn’t support candidates who claim to be progressive, but don’t prioritize the fight against fossil fuel interests

Story Transcript

PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay.

The Gathering, a meeting of 200 or so progressive thought leaders invited to Burlington, Vermont, was a meeting to talk about what comes next in the coming 2020 elections to help create a vision, a policy framework, for what candidates might run on, what people might fight for. It comes at a rather momentous time in human history, as I said in one of the other interviews; 2020 is maybe the most important election anyplace, ever, given what’s at stake. The Gathering was called by Jane O’Meara Sanders, who’s co-founder of the Sanders Institute; now serves as a fellow. Jane served as a political consultant, has held appointed and elected office, and Jane was the driving force behind the Gathering. And she now joins us here in our studio at the Gathering. Thanks for joining us.

JANE SANDERS: Thanks, Paul.

PAUL JAY: Your hopes going in—and I heard this a little bit in the email back and forth—is we don’t want to spend all this time trashing Trump. We really want to talk policy and what a different world might look like. How do you feel that was achieved?

JANE SANDERS: I was astounded. I mean, we had 49 speakers in 48 hours. And actually, I think a few added on during the weekend. It was thought provoking, inspiring, much better than I had ever envisioned. I had pretty high thoughts for this weekend. We came—you mentioned thought leaders. And what I realized by the end is they’re not just progressive thought leaders. They are bringing the heart to the, their hearts to the causes, to the issues that we talked about. They’re leading from values and principles, and then their intellect informs the rest. But the first layer is the values and the principles that we espouse, for democracy and for human dignity.

PAUL JAY: The times we live in are, as I said, this may be—the coming election may be the most important ever, to a large extent because of climate change. If a climate denier is elected again, or if a corporate Democrat is elected who pays lip service to the climate crisis and doesn’t take effective action, we’re kind of screwed. We’re already close to 1.5 or 2 degrees above—in terms of warming, above pre-industrial averages. The tipping point is really within sight. In terms of the messaging of the extent of the crisis and what to do about it, do you think that was addressed here?

JANE SANDERS: I think it was. I think that people walked away with the concept that, and with the realization, that time is running out. And what we need to do is not just ask people what to do or inform people about the issue.

One of the things that we need to do, and the reason for the Gathering, was to amplify each other’s voices, resonate on the issues. We need leadership that actually says, I’m sorry, this is a crisis. We need to address it now. Not next year, not the year after. It’s leadership at the local, the statewide, the national, the international level. Not just people who are elected, but people who want to make a difference in the world.

At the end of the climate crisis panel, Bill McKibben said that we need to have healthcare, Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, and 100% renewable. Those are not the only things. But the 100% renewable and the focus on the climate crisishas to be at the outset of anybody running for office. Where do you stand? Where do you stand? Not [crosstalk]

PAUL JAY: Absolutely. But I’m not hearing it. Even with progressive candidates it’s like, I have to say even to some extent Bernie, although he’s certainly better than any of the others that actually have a mainstream role. But the extent of the threat is not like—it’s got to be front and center. We’re often, it’s like a shopping list, healthcare, Medicare for all, $15, climate. Well, climate is, it doesn’t matter if you get $15 an hour if we ain’t here. There seems to be a feeling both amongst people that work on this issue in the climate sector, people involved in political campaigns, that if you talk about the extent of the crisis you’re just going to scare people. Well, shouldn’t we be scaring people?

JANE SANDERS: I think so. I think you’re absolutely right. And we have to start—I believe a lot of people have conferences, and that’s the end game. Let’s have a conference. This was a jumping off point. We want to have the conference inform future action. What I heard from the questions from the attendees, the hallway conversations was that we have to hold people accountable. It’s not from a perception of you have to vote for this or vote for that. What do you understand about the climate crisis? Where do you stand on it, what are you willing to do, and what are you not willing to do? Don’t talk to me about in sound bites, don’t talk to me to say climate crisis is really bad, but no, I’m not going to fight the pipelines in the states. I’m not going to not take fossil fuel industry money. I think with the climate crisis, I think more than anything else we have to draw a very clear line and say these are the expectations. If you don’t do this, I don’t care how progressive you are, supposedly, it’s not—we’re not interested.

PAUL JAY: It’s got to be a criteria people use on who they vote for. But to do that we’ve got to get into those sections amongst working people who right now, climate is barely on the top 20 of their list. We did some work in southern Pennsylvania, we’ve done work around Baltimore where we’re based. And without doubt, the day-to-day suffering is such that people, they want that addressed. This thing has to be framed in a way that it is today. It’s not some great future prospect.And it’s your kids at stake, your grandkids at stake. The messaging is not getting through much to ordinary people.

JANE SANDERS: Well, when you look at the floods and the torrential rains and the fires, there is no analysis of that on the news. They cover it like voyeurs to say, oh, look at this terrible thing that’s happening. These people are helping, this is good news. The community is coming together, great. But they don’t ever ask why. Why is this occurring? Cover the science. And that is not happening. They need to cover the science.

PAUL JAY: Every day.

JANE SANDERS: Yeah, every day. But they’re not, and we need to insist they do.

PAUL JAY: We’re going to be, we are. and we’re going to be every day doing science. Because what’s missing from the whole discourse for ordinary people, people coming in on the issue, is the sense of urgency. People that understand what’s going on, we feel a sense of urgency, but there’s still this feeling that you can’t tell people that because it’s going to overwhelm them. It’s like treating people like kids.

JANE SANDERS: Partly. But I also think that people don’t want to have—want to just focus on a problem without a solution. Many of the people that are speaking about it or looking for votes don’t want to deal with the solutions. I do think that we have an opportunity at this point in time to say, to lay out what this administration has been doing in terms of rolling back air and water and all this, and all these regulations, and to recognize the support they’re giving to the fossil fuel industry with our tax dollars and not to renewables, which would help us. But to be able to say there is an answer.

The House just turned, and we should be making it very clear to the Democrats that are in control of the House, are you going to do something? If you’re not going to do something, thank you very much, we’re not going to be supporting you. If we say to the people, this is what you can do, and this is what we expect of you as leaders in your community or as elected leaders, we need your voice out there, then we can make a change. I think people need to not just focus only on the climate crisis, because as you say, that’s what everybody is saying. Everybody is going to be very nervous about it and very concerned. They should be, but we have to give them a path forward. We have to say how are you going to be able to make this-

PAUL JAY: Well, one of the things that came out of the conference was the discussion of a new green deal, a Green New Deal, I should say, which seems to make a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense when you already understand why we need a new green deal—Green New Deal. Most people don’t even get the urgency of that.

JANE SANDERS: I think the bully pulpit really matters. The people in that room, and hopefully the people that watched on livestream, and the people that watch the things we’ll be putting out in the future at the Sanders Institute, will understand more. And Real News. You’ve been talking to people this entire time to have the Real News be covering the science, covering the facts, and having people who are in a position to lead their communities to solution. That helps. Now, the problem is that so many of the solutions, or so many of the approaches, seem to be protesting only. That’s not what we—I mean, protests are very important. That’s not enough. What we need to do is demand accountability, demand that they don’t take money from pipeline, they don’t support banks that fund pipelines. We need to say to our representatives and to the media, we expect you to ask and answer serious questions that are complex and not just give us sound bites.

PAUL JAY: I got a suggestion for the Sanders Institute.

JANE SANDERS: Okay.

PAUL JAY: One of the things I learned over the weekend was how Barcelona has created a publicly owned energy company. It seems to me more of that kind of program, like here’s what, if you actually took over a city, major city in this country, here’s what a city can do, here’s what a state could do. Also in terms of Congress, I think there’s going to be a real fight over whether real hearings are going to be held over what to do about climate change or trash Trump. I have no problem with trashing Trump. But if the focus is on that it’s just more of the same rhetorical battle.

JANE SANDERS: I agree. I think, unfortunately, the Democrats have a great opportunity, and unfortunately I’m concerned that they are going to blow it and focus on investigations, investigations, investigations. People want them to pay attention to the real issues facing their lives. And what’s happening now, I know, I really want Medicare for All, I really want $15 minimum wage, we want a lot of things. And a lot of new ideas and replicable policies came out of this conference. In terms of the climate crisis, what we need to do is focus on it, and if they don’t deliver to the voters that put them in, I think that it’s over. I think it’s over for that party. I don’t, I think-

PAUL JAY: It’s over for us humans.

JANE SANDERS: Well, but no. Because I think if they don’t focus on real change, on effecting real change, especially in this area, I think that we will be able to lead from below.

PAUL JAY: The logic—I mean, other than the fact that a whole section of the Democratic Party is very tied up with finance and fossil fuel, but set that aside for a second. They accept the dictatorship of corporate media. What I mean by that is the corporate news media is making a fortune out of this partisan battle. Not only does it drive ratings, because it’s like watching a football game, then the parties spend a billion, over a billion dollars, billions on advertising and campaigns. The partisan war, the news media loves. The logic goes if we have a hearing on climate change they won’t cover it.

JANE SANDERS: That’s what they said, actually. They have said that to us, that the ratings on climate change don’t matter. Then, at the same time, the ratings on fires and floods, they cover ad nauseum. Now, how hard would it be to cover them in a way that said these are the facts, this is climate change at work. This is why it’s happening. And this is what you can expect to happen later. These parts of the world are going to be underwater, and there’s going to be mass migration, and there’s going to be food shortages. They don’t have to cover it all at once. But when you look at things and you see the same footage for three days of terrible personal pain that people are experiencing, the loss of their homes and of their communities and even their cities, instead of saying, okay, we don’t have to put that on again, we can keep informing the people. That’s my, one of my concerns, is I think the fourth estate has been letting us down. A democracy requires an informed electorate. The media, the fourth estate, is supposed to inform the public. They’re not doing that. They’re selling ratings. But they’re not even thinking deeply about it. Because if they covered the fires and explained them, they’d get the same ratings.

PAUL JAY: I agree with you. But I have no expectation that corporate news media is going to change. This Democratic-controlled House, if they’re serious about climate change, they can create hearings with as much drama as the Kavanaugh hearings. You know, subpoena the head of Exxon, create a real dramatic presentation.

JANE SANDERS: Like they did with tobacco years ago, under Henry Waxman.

PAUL JAY: Exactly. But they have to want to do it. And that’s going to be a fight.

JANE SANDERS: It is going to be a fight, because people don’t want to take on the banks. They don’t want to take on the fossil fuel industry. They don’t want to take on the large donors and the big corporations. My hope is there will be—and I know there will be a group of people that will in the new Congress. And the Progressive Caucus in the Congress is pretty good.

PAUL JAY: There is a group now pushing for hearings on a Green New Deal.

JANE SANDERS: I think we’ll see some, for once, moving in the right direction. And I think the fact that under the Trump administration so many things have been so difficult for not just climate crisis, but everything, that I think people are beginning to realize we can’t take six more years of this. We can’t possibly survive that well. I guess that’s dramatic but-

PAUL JAY: A lot of people won’t survive.

JANE SANDERS: Yeah, a lot of people won’t. I think people are getting that. I have more faith in the American people. I think that they’re going to pay attention if they can be informed. That’s why places like The Real News and the Sanders Institute and all the people that were here from different organizations are so important, because—you started it with I don’t think they know. That education is extremely important.

To those who have already suffered from climate impacts, like the Native Americans displaced by sea level rise in Louisiana and permafrost melt in Alaska, or those who lost their homes in wildfires or lives in heat waves, the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page has a message: you’re expendable.

That’s the gist of a pair of pieces responding to the NCA (National Climate Assessment) this week. The report says explicitly that climate change is already making extreme weather like hurricanes and wildfires worse, is already raising sea levels to the point that coastal communities are flooding on sunny days, and is already hurting the health of Americans across the country. Despite this, all the Journal seems to care about is money.

In a piece published on Monday, Steve Koonin 😈 argues that the report says “the overall economic impact of human-caused climate change is expected to be quite small.” To reiterate, this is the report that says many coastal communities will likely flood daily regardless of emission reductions, and that the entire $3.6 trillion dollar coastal real estate market is on the line.

The NCA also suggests there will be hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses, primarily from three factors. First, Americans dying prematurely means lots of hospital spending but not much else (turns out the dead don’t buy much). Second, there will be losses in outdoor worker productivity as entire swaths of the South becomes so hot that sustained outdoor work would literally be lethal. And thirdly, sea level rise will put coastal communities under water, literally and financially.

But because the economy will grow between now and then, Koonin claims that the costs won’t be so bad. As a country, we’ll be four times richer by 2090, so what’s a few hundred billion dollars lost every year by then?

Holman Jenkins Jr. 👹 follows Koonin’s lead, and on Tuesday put a finer point on his misplaced priorities of profits over people.

In reference to the report’s $510 billion in potential losses by 2090, representing thousands of dead Americans, Jenkins quips that “paying this bill would be a nuisance, not Armageddon.”

Sure, a nuisance. What a great way to describe grandmothers dropping dead of heat stroke, or children gasping for air as asthma rates in communities of color climb even higher.

Jenkins helpfully advises the climate community, which he’s spent years insulting, to slip a carbon tax into a larger tax reform package, because “the biggest holdup to direct action on climate is showing that preventing these changes would be cheaper than enduring them.”

Apparently, $500 billion dollars a year in dead Americans, flooded coastal communities and the scorching of the South’s agriculture industry is affordable, but switching from fossil fuels to renewables now is just too expensive.

While most deniers are clearly funded by fossil fuels, it’s starting to feel like the WSJ’s biggest advertiser might be the coffin-makers.

Posted by: AGelbert

As I was researching an article about Tesla’s participation in the new EV Drive Coalition about a week ago, I came across a source from The Daily Caller on the subject. As I skimmed, this online newspaper’s right wing ideology was quite evident — not my worldview, granted, but didn’t Sun Tzu say in The Art of War, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles?” So I read on … and was amazed at how this newspaper, in the guise of reporting on new electric vehicle advocacy, offered its readers some targeted messaging, completely neglected to include many important facts, and chose language specifically intended to discredit Tesla without foundation.

Let’s do a little discourse analysis to uncover the meanings, methods, and messages within the article. It’s really fascinating! And it speaks to how much the fossil fuel industry has to lose by Tesla’s ascendancy in the automotive and energy markets through its model of a sustainable tomorrow for the planet.

The Daily Caller 🐉 offers the following “About Us” information on its website:

Quote

“Founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson, a 20-year veteran journalist, and Neil Patel, former chief policy advisor to Vice President Cheney, The Daily Caller is one of America’s largest and fastest-growing news publications. … From exposing shocking mismanagement of Republican National Committee funds to exclusively revealing the FBI’s interview with Hillary Clinton, The Daily Caller’s reporting has been thorough and tough on members of both political parties. … The Daily Caller’s reporting is distributed worldwide to over 20 million unique readers each month through our highly-visited homepage, wildly popular newsletters and apps, countless citations from the world’s other top news sites, and our vast social media following.”

discredit Tesla - Courtesy of Media Bias/ Fact Check

Framing the Status of EVs Today in Order to Discredit Tesla

From the people (“Tucker Carlson,” “Neil Patel,” “Vice President Cheney,” “Hillary Clinton”), to its topics of interest (“Republican National Committee funds,” “FBI’s interview,” “both political parties”), to its audience (“unique readers”), and its self-congratulatory adjectives (“largest,” “fastest-growing,” “shocking,” “exclusively,” “thorough,” “tough,” “highly-visited,” “wildly popular,” “countless,” “vast”), The Daily Caller self-defines in terms of strongly right-biased story selection and self-aggrandizing exclamations. Noted for conservative media opinion writers and deep-thinking essayists rather than journalists who do original reporting, the news and opinion website has been labeled by Media Bias/ Fact Check as “mixed” for its numerous failed fact checks.

The Daily Caller and all the GOP 🐉 loving Fossil Fuel 🦕🦖 Fascists that spew disinformation there on behalf of Profit Over People and Planet need BE RUN OUT OF BUSINESS.

An Action Movie We Won't Want to See

Unchecked warming could trigger a slew of simultaneous climate crises in parts of the world by the end of the century, with some areas being hit by as many as six climate-influenced disasters at a time, according to new research.

A multidisciplinary study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change identifies 467 different ways climate change is already impacting society—including warming, droughts, fires, sea-level rise, changes to food systems and health problems—and predicts that these disasters will begin to compound on top of one another if warming continues at current rates.

Posted by: AGelbert

In Not-So-Subtle Nod 👍 to Climate Change, South Park Shows a ManBearPig Denier Eaten by ManBearPig

''The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks,'' Dr. Wallace S. Broecker warned humanity, decades ago. Now it looks like the beast is awakening, and even former critics seem to be coming around to the idea that we should stop poking it.

This reversal is even showing up in what we watch after work. The libertarian-leaning sensibilities of South Park’s creators have been plainly evident on TV for years. Humor like South Park’s fuels the sort of nihilistic “both parties are the same” rhetoric that allows edgy young men to feel superior to both parties, without having to actually make a political choice.

Climate change has come up in the show multiple times, from skewering the over-the-top dramatics with a Day After Tomorrow parody to lampooning the smug self-satisfaction of Prius driving liberals. But the episode that has continued to resonate, particularly in the deniersphere, is the ManBearPig episode. This infamous 2006 bit mocked Al Gore’s pandering to the press and public while promoting his Inconvenient Truth movie.

To be fair, the episode was always more about Gore’s attention-seeking behavior and bitterness at losing the presidency. The titular mythical monster (half man, half bear, half pig) served a stand-in for his public concern for climate change. For deniers obsessed with Gore, though, “ManBearPig” became something of a meme.

But in last Wednesday’s episode, twelve long years after Gore was mocked mercilessly for warning of ManBearPig’s existence, the cryptid made its first (real world) appearance in the show. And real news like NBC and Vanity Fair--as well as conservative fake news like Newsbusters, the Washington Times and Fox--all wrote how this new episode could be considered an anthropocene apology to Al Gore.

In the episode, the cartoon’s four young protagonists must seek out Gore after being blamed for the murders committed by ManBearPig (which police mistake for yet another school shooting). They’re determined to make amends so that they can clear their names and take down ManBearPig together. Lest you think the creators are now fans of the former VP, the cartoon Gore is less than gracious, requiring the kids apologize repeatedly and throw him a party at Olive Garden, where he bores them with a slideshow of his career. At the end, he gives them his Nobel prize and tells the kids it’s up to them now. (Presumably, this cliffhanger will be be picked up in tonight’s episode.)

But in one particularly climatic scene, captured by the right-wing “Media Research Center,” ManBearPig slaughters his way through a restaurant, while a glib denier explains that “You can't just go along with what people are saying, Susan, okay? There's no scientific proof, no real evidence of a ManBearPig… everyone wants to use the fear of a ManBearPig to get what they want. They throw around bad science, bad taxidermy… ”

When ManBearPig crashes through the wall behind the man, and begins a violent rampage he continues undaunted, saying “You can't just let people tell you that if you don't believe in ManBearPig, then you don't care about the world.”

When Susan points out that not only is ManBearPig real, but here, right now (and ripping the spine out of the guy behind him) the man shifts to the denier line that it’s too late now: “What can we do that everyone else will also do, Susan? Come on, use your brain. Even if we do something about it... What about the Chinese? They’re just gonna keep right on--”

But ManBearPig picks him up and begins chomping down on the his skull, cutting off his denial mid-sentence.

While climate change was already plenty real twelve years ago, when ManBearPig was just a figment of Gore’s imagination, a decade of Sandys and Harveys and Marias and Florences, of wildfires and droughts and pests andheat waves, have made the risk of poking Dr. Broecker’s climate beast an obvious, if inconvenient, truth.

With dozens of lives lost and thousands of acres burned, the fires currently raging across California are an unpleasant reminder of what’s at stake in the climate fight.

Those who are opposed to the clean energy solutions that, while obviously wouldn’t put out the flames but would at least quit fanning them, haven’t let this moment go without their own commentary.

For example, we heard that Dr. Jane Orient 🦕 of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) sent out a press release on Sunday with two broad claims. One was that since warming has paused and more acres were burned in the 1930s, CO2 emissions aren’t the cause of increased wildfires. Orient also says that if the US adopted “California-like renewable energy mandates” that fight climate change, it still wouldn’t prevent forest fires. The claims link to two year-old page on a Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) website, one on wildfires, the other California energy policy.

Now before one dives into the veracity of these claims, one should consider their source. One association of doctors linking to another group of doctors certainly sounds respectable... But are they?

No. Not at all. Not even the slightest little bit.

As we’ve covered before, Dr. Jane Orient is the Breitbart-beloved anti-vaxxer who once compared a tobacco tax to “Third Reich measures” and more recently was the source of some of the conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health on the campaign trail. The AAPS🦕 , which she 🦕 runs, along with DDP, considers Medicare and Medicaid “evil,” publishes pseudo-scientific claims with starkly conservative bents (like denying the existence of HIV and claiming abortions cause breast cancer) and once suggested President Obama was not actually “a brilliant orator,” but instead uses “neuro linguistic programing (NLP), a covert form of hypnosis.”

So while the organizations may appear legitimate at first glance, even a cursory search reveals their bald partisanship and outright insanity. Woe to the reporter who takes the press release seriously at face value.

However, since even a stopped clock is right twice a day, we’ll take a look at their actual claims.

On whether rising CO2 levels are making wildfires worse, Orient and the AAPS use a graph going back to 1926 to claim that since more acres were burnt then, it must be poor forest management causing fires now. They use the National Interagency Fire Center’s data to prove this point, despite the fact that the Center says explicitly that data prior to 1983 is unreliable, and “should not be compared to later data.” (Exactly why is complicated, but include the fact that pre-’83 fires may be double or triple-counted.)

Not only is Orient guilty of the classic logical fallacy of “people die naturally therefore murder’s a hoax,” but she’s also using unreliable data to do so.

In reality, the connections between fires and climate are varied and well-established. Temperatures were exceptionally high this season where the fires started, and have risen twice the global average in the west since 1970, while the wildfire season has grown from five to seven months, on average. This corresponds to a fourfold increase in large fires between 1980 and 2010. Further, warming has contributed to the drying-out of the west: one study shows that over half the increase in aridity (a key driver of fires) is because of climate change.

We can make similarly quick work of the second claim that a California-like renewable energy standard wouldn’t prevent forest fires. While obviously investing in renewables won’t completely stop wildfires, as the above links between warming and fires demonstrate, fossil fuel emissions make things warmer and dryer, which are the conditions necessary for fires like these.

By phrasing her question as though people are saying “Only YOU can prevent forest fires, by putting up solar panels,” Dr. Orient is just tossing a strawman onto the fires.

Posted by: AGelbert

Big Oil 🐉🦕🦖 claims it's doing its part to combat climate change. A new study finds it's not even close.

SNIPPET:

Despite years of claims and commitments about clean investment and alleviating climate change, the world's largest oil companies have contributed just 1% of their spending budgets to green energy in 2018.

Companies like Royal Dutch Shell, Total, and BP, have all accelerated efforts into renewables and battery technology in recent years. But many efforts have been overshadowed by the oil industry's efforts to block or overturn environmental regulations.

Posted by: AGelbert

Before we had Trump’s swarm of bloodsucking lobbyists gutting government regulations from within, we had Cheney’s. Before Trump brazenly used the White House to boost his brand, we had Cheney wallowing in emoluments: He let his energy industry pals shape energy policy; he pushed to invade Iraq, giving no-bid contracts to his former employer, Halliburton, and helping his Big Oil cronies reap the spoils in Iraq.

Agelbert NOTE: The NYT asks the WRONG QUESTION. Trump is HERE NOW. Yeah, Trump would not be HERE without Cheney 🦖 (AND Obama 🐩), but the M.I.C. that put Cheney there is STILL HERE.

The M.I.C. (i.e the DEEP STATE) PUT Cheney. Obama AND Trump (and ALL Presidents since WWII) IN POWER!

The M.I.C. IS THE PROBLEM, of which Trump 🦀 is currently just one of its Capitalist Profit Over People and Planet Biosphere destroying symptoms 😈👹🐉🦕🦖💵🎩🍌🏴‍☠️.

The NYT, a CREATURE OF THE M.I.C., is engaging in an attempt to DISTRACT we-the-people from the REAL PROBLEM. The article says many truths, YET refuses to connect ALL the dots that lead straight to the 'MIGHT EQUALS RIGHT' Social Darwinst RELIGION of the Wall Street 'GREED IS GOOD', biosphere math challenged evil bastards.

Posted by: AGelbert

Lies, Lies, & More Lies: LawrenceSolomon🦕 Is Scared & So Is The Fossil Fuel Industry

October 21st, 2018 by Joshua S Hill

It should come as no surprise that the fossil fuel industry has many defenders🐵 🐒 🦍 willing to step up to the plate and bat for them — it is, after all, a multi-billion-dollar industry with long-standing relationships and a desire not to collapse into infamy and oblivion.

The simple reality is that, for a large part of the planet, the fossil fuel industry is on its last legs. Developed nations are wholesale turning to renewable energy — either by federal impetus or through the work of sub-national players such as local governments and corporations — and developing nations are looking to renewable energy as a means to jump over the fossil fuel step altogether, avoiding the need to build up costly nationwide infrastructure and preventing further emissions increases.

Fear & Ignorance

This new reality, however, is apparently difficult for some people to comprehend. Most recently, BP CEO Bob Dudley, speaking as the “Petroleum Executive of the Year” at the Oil & Money conference in London, raised his fears of the global divestment and disclosure movements that are impacting the fossil fuel industry, suggesting that they “could lead to bad outcomes.” His rationale, however, was based on faulty assumptions and blind ignorance of the realities.

BP 🦕 CEO Bob Dudley 😈

However, Dudley can at least be given credit for admitting the need for change, and presenting a path forward which he claimed was “not a call for business as usual” and one that “requires significant and rapid disruption to our industry.”

The same credit cannot be given to Lawrence Solomon, however, a columnist for Canada’s National Post section (which bears the name Financial Post after the business newspaper of the same name) and the Executive Director of Energy Probe, the consumer and energy research team of Canada’s Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Writing an op-ed recently for the Financial Post, Solomon set aside any dignity or professional integrity he may once have grasped to and penned what can only be described as a hit-piece on the renewable energy industry with all the internal consistency of a wet tissue. Solomon’s article — entitled “Trudeau stands alone as Canada — and the world — abandons green energy” — ran with the witty lede, “Wind and solar have become the fossils of the energy industry; oil, gas and coal remain the fuels of the future.” An entire fact-check article could be written about the opening paragraph on its own — not bad, considering it boasts only 109 words in four sentences.

Solomon’s article was brought to our attention here at CleanTechnica by a frustrated reader who asked that we investigate the claims Solomon made in his piece — described by the reader as “so untruthful and so far from reality that I think it deserves to be called out.”

More than simply “calling out” Lawrence Solomon, however, I think it’s worth being completely upfront and honest about Solomon and his opinions — and opinions they are, make no mistake about it, in the true spirit of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the word — “A view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge” — for, it would appear that Solomon’s opinions have never even heard of the concept of “facts” and “knowledge.”

Lies, Lies, & MoreLies

To be fair, the issue is not so much with Lawrence Solomon in and of himself, rather, he is simply representative of a number of such pundits who occupy their own little space of real estate in magazines, newspapers, and on television the world over.

Solomon is in no way particularly special for the absurdity of his views, but he serves as a convenient example of the types of lies that are spread, and the way in which people opposed to renewable energy and in denial about global warming make their arguments.

In his opinion article, Lawrence Solomon attempts to make the argument that renewable energy is not only on the back foot around the world, but that it is in full retreat. To support this argument, Solomon refers to several pieces of so-called evidence which he has pulled kicking and screaming out of context. I’ll handle them one at a time.

China

Solomon claims that China has “begun to throw in the towel by cutting subsidies to renewables, an augur of the demise of investment in its renewables sector.” Solomon also points to recent reporting from green campaigners CoalSwarm which claimed that 259 gigawatts (GW) of new coal capacity are currently under construction.

Satellite visualization from Carbon Tracker

While Solomon accurately reported the findings from CoalSwarm’s new satellite imagery report — which showed construction ongoing at coal plants across the country, the result of a permitting surge between late-2014 and early-2016 — he incorrectly blames the reason for China’s decision to cut subsidies to renewables.

It’s important to remember the context of China’s current reliance on coal. The new capacity currently under construction is the result of local authorities approving new projects, and actually flies in the face of China’s Central Government’s decisions to halt construction of new coal-fired power plants. Toward the end of 2016 and over the first few months of 2017, China announced the cancellation of 30 large coal-fired power plants amounting to 17 gigawatts (GW), followed soon after by the cancellation of 104 more under-construction and planned coal projects amounting to 120 GW. In March of this year, a report showed that the development of new coal plants in 2017 had declined in China, thanks in part to the Central Government’s decision to suspend construction across hundreds of projects.

Unfortunately, CoalSwarm’s recent report might suggest that China’s Central Government no longer has the control it once had to make these sweeping cuts, but a report published earlier this month by Carbon Tracker shows that 40% of China’s coal plants are already losing money and that the country could save nearly $390 billion by closing plants instead of keeping them operational.

Further, it’s important to look at the whole of what is happening in China. In September, China’s National Development & Reform Commission (NDRC) wrote a draft policy that paved the way to increase the country’s renewable energy target from 20% to 35% by 2030.

Later that same month, China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) issued draft guidelines that would look to phase out power generation subsidies — just as Solomon highlighted, except, the intention of the decision was to provide the country’s renewable energy sector with further technological and policy support so that those technologies can compete against other technologies on their own. Specifically, the draft guidelines seek to incentivize renewable energy technologies in regions where they can operate without help from government subsidies.

“The reason China’s cutting subsidy is mainly because of the huge deficit in the national renewable subsidy fund,” explained Yali Jiang, a solar analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, who spoke to me via email. “By the end of 2017, the deficit amounted around $19 billion including those for wind and solar projects. As a result, the government expects to, for instance, restrict new solar installations that require national subsidy immediately.”

“China’s solar installation contracted in 3Q due to the policy change,” Jiang added. “The grid-connected PV capacity halved in July and August compared with last year. But the country remains to be the largest investor in clean energy in 3Q ($26.7 billion), a fraction above the same period of 2017.”

Far from being “an augur of the demise of investment in its renewables sector,” as Solomon so dramatically put it, China’s decision to cut subsidies is actually based in a desire to minimize the financial strain caused by subsidizing new power generation, while at the same time providing technological and political support that will help renewable energy compete on its own — much as it does in other parts of the world, such as throughout Europe and North America.

Europe

Lawrence Solomon, far from being happy with one example, decided to add another to the mix, explaining that, “With the cutting of subsidies to renewables in the [European Union], investment last year dropped to less than half of its peak six years earlier.”

Again, Solomon correctly looked at the chart, sourced from Bloomberg New Energy Finance and highlighted by the World Economic Forum in May of 2018 — an article, mind you, which highlights the success of the investment in China’s renewable energy sector, and betrays Solomon’s contention that China has suffered a decline in investment in its renewables sector (made literally the sentence beforehand).

While it is true that investment in Europe’s renewable energy industry has fallen off in recent times, it’s doubly important to look at the region’s capacity installations over the same time. Between 2011 and 2017 — the six-year period Solomon highlighted — generation from renewable electricity across the 28 Member States of the European Unionskyrocketed.

Complete renewable energy capacity additions for Europe are difficult to come by — unsurprising, given the nature of a supranational governing body — but we can mitigate that somewhat by looking specifically at the two dominant renewable energy technologies, wind, and solar.

Annual wind energy installations across Europe have steadily ticked up each year, declining only once since 2011, in 2013.

It’s worth noting, though, that new capacity additions for 2018 are on a worrying downward trend, as seen by half-year figures published by WindEurope in July.

Europe’s solar industry has similarly suffered from recent investment figures, as can be seen in the graph below, published by SolarPower Europe in June (as part of a global outlook).

Evolution of Global Annual Solar PV Installed Capacity 2000-2017

So while from a certain point of view, Lawrence Solomon can claim that Europe’s clean energy investment has fallen, resulting in lower solar capacity additions and moderate wind additions, it’s worth seeing this in light of the whole. Solar has begun growing again across Europe — with a total of 9.2 GW worth of new capacity added in 2017, a 30% increase on the year before — and offshore wind continues to increase its share. Europe was also one of the first regions to double-down on solar, and accounts for 28% of the global total, with a total of 114 GW worth of installed capacity.

Additionally, even though investments have decreased, this does not necessarily speak to a larger fall-off for the renewable energy industry. Rather, as technologies such as solar PV and onshore wind mature, their costs have decreased, which means that less money is needed to build even more capacity.

Lawrence Solomon may have struck closer to the mark with this particular example, but it does not serve to bolster his argument any, considering the impact of Brexit and the UK’s shift away from solar towards wind, the declining cost of mature technologies, and natural market dynamics and political malfeasance from politicians who share Solomon’s point of view.

Japan

Investment in Japan’s clean energy industry has indeed slowed since 2016 — essentially falling off a financial cliff at the end of 2015. Much like China, however, Japan’s situation is not as clear-cut as a graph might show.

“After years of record-breaking investment driven by some of the world’s most generous feed-in tariffs, China and Japan are cutting back on building new large-scale projects and shifting towards digesting the capacity they have already put in place,” said Justin Wu, head of Asia for BNEF, said in January of 2017.

“China is facing slowing power demand and growing wind and solar curtailment. The government is now focused on investing in grids and reforming the power market so that the renewables in place can generate to their full potential. In Japan, future growth will come not from utility-scale projects but from rooftop solar systems installed by consumers attracted by the increasingly favorable economics of self-consumption.”

It’s ironic, however, that Solomon decided to use Japan as throwaway proof of “a worldwide trend rejecting renewables.” If he had made the argument even a year ago, it might have held more weight, but given recent moves by Japan’s government, and corporations and utilities within Japan, it loses all importance.

In July, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, better known as TEPCO, announced that it intends to pursue the development of between 6 and 7 GW worth of renewable energy capacity worth tens of billions of dollars in an intentional move away from nuclear power. Speaking to Nikkei, TEPCO’s president Tomoaki Kobayakawa announced his company will look to develop 6 to 7 GW of renewable energy across Japan and overseas in a move expected to yield 100 billion yen ($8.98 billion) in profit. “We must gain a competitive advantage in renewable energy,” he said.

Meanwhile, in September, Japan’s Electric Power Development Co., better known as J-Power, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with French multinational electric utility ENGIE to collaborate on power projects, specifically offshore wind and floating offshore wind projects — a further sign of Japan’s turn away from nuclear, and specifically towards contending with Taiwan as an offshore wind hub. And only last week, the Fitch Group published a forecast which expected Japan to add 17 GW worth of new solar capacity by the end of 2020, before the sector begins to slow.

For Lawrence Solomon, Japan also does not prove his belief that renewable energy is on the back foot.

The UK, et al

I could go on. Solomon points to Germany, the UK, and Australia as further proof that the world is turning away from renewable energy. While both Germany and Australia serve as good examples of this, they are about the only two countries that do — and only from a national point of view, with sub-state actors serving to pick up where the nation’s governments left off (or, in Australia’s case, never picked up to begin with).

Solomon’s citing the UK as an example of a flagging renewable energy industry, however, truly beggars belief. Not only is the UK home to one of the world’s most persistent and dominant renewable energy countries, Scotland, but the UK is also the world’s offshore wind energy leader, boasting a portfolio of projects in operation, under construction, or in development, of 35.2 GW.

Agreed, the UK’s investment is likely to fall, a point made by the Green Alliance in January of 2017, analyzing the UK Government’s own numbers. The government has proven lackluster at best when it comes to preparing for a post-Brexit world, and it has thoroughly mishandled commitments to various technologies (onshore wind and solar, in particular). However, it’s important to look at the long-term — the Green Alliance’s analysis only looks to 2020, and a July announcement from the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy could mitigate some of these short-term losses, by setting a timeline for new offshore wind auctions starting from 2021.

“The renewables sector in the UK has seen pretty dire policy from government: solar and onshore wind projects have been effectively blocked, despite the fact that they’re now the cheapest form of new power,” explained Dustin Benton, Policy Director at Green Alliance. “By contrast, dirty power stations, supported by the UK’s flawed capacity market, have seen several hundred million pounds of government contracts over the past few years.”

Image Credit: MHI Vestas

“The exception to this generally gloomy picture is in offshore wind: despite irregular auctions, the sector has reduced prices by two-thirds over the past two years, and the government has committed to procuring around 16 GW of new offshore wind during the 2020s, putting the country on track for 30 GW by 2030 – a level consistent with meeting the UK’s carbon targets.”

It’s also worth remembering that Great Britain currently boasts its lowest ever share of fossil fuels in its energy mix, accounting for only 41% of total generation, down from 71% only 7 years ago.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Lawrence? Lie!

An argument against renewable energy and climate change is not complete, however, without mentioning the biggest elephant in the room — the United States. Solomon reserves an entire paragraph for the US but barely manages to come close to the truth.

Solomon sets the scene — the Democrats are out of power and Donald Trump is in, and quickly moves to exit from the Paris Agreement. What did the country manage to do with this new paradigm shift?

Right out of the gate, Solomon … well, he pretty much rushes headlong into the gate. Solomon starts out by claiming that the US has revived its coal industry. One wonders exactly where to start on this. In January, Reuters obtained preliminary US government data which showed that the coal industry continues to shed jobs. In February, figures published by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) revealed that not only had there been no new coal capacity added during 2017 (and only 3 units in 2016) but that coal’s total share of generating capacity has declined by 17.83% over the past five years. In fact, according to figures published in June by the US Energy Information Administration, coal has dropped to providing only 27% of total electricity generation.

The cause for coal’s steep decline? According to researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Colorado Boulder writing in May, the responsible party is not renewable energy but is in fact the decline in natural gas prices. And only this week, the White House — the very center of Donald Trump’s power — has reportedly shelved a plan to bail out the coal (and nuclear) sectors.

The final point to make is, possibly, the most absurd. Written and positioned as if it was the final nail in Solomon’s argument, he writes that “The once-powerful United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, formerly a fixture in the news, is defanged and forgotten, having lost its US funding and its relevance.”

Solomon’s article was published on September 28, only 11 days before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report warning that limiting global warming to 1.5°C will “require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” Putting aside the fact that the IPCC works in long-term cycles and is not beholden to publish material regularly (nor has it ever), Solomon must have regretted that particular sentence.

Abandoning Truth

It takes something special to be able to so blatantly and casually lie in public as Lawrence Solomon manages. To so clearly and repeatedly mishandle the facts and misconstrue the evidence requires either an almost champion level of ignorance, or a complete disregard for the truth. Solomon squeezes at least a dozen lies and half-truths into only 750 words — that’s at least one every 62 words.

Is the global renewable energy industry on the back foot? No — in fact, in many parts of the world, it is progressing faster than ever before, and well above any other energy technology. The industry is maturing, however, and with that naturally comes some bumpy patches — stagnation, political intervention and misappropriation, and economic fluctuations; to think otherwise is naive.

But to think that these bumps in the road represent some global shift away from renewable energy is to ignore all common sense and historical evidence.Renewable energy isn’t going away, nor is it declining in popularity. It is the future — not just because we need it to be, but because it is economically better.

“One of the most preposterous hoaxes in the history of the planet,” scoffed Rush Limbaugh of Palm Beach. Gov. Rick Scott’s administration went so far as to bar some agencies from even using the term “climate change,” according to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (Scott denied this).

Myopic Floridians have plenty of company. President Trump dismissed climate change as a hoax “created by and for the Chinese.” Senator James Inhofe , a Republican of Oklahoma, “disproved” climate change by taking a snowball onto the Senate floor and noting that it was chilly outside; using similarly rigorous scientific methods , he wrote a book about climate change called “The Greatest Hoax".

Alas, denying climate change doesn’t actually prevent it. North Carolina passed a law in 2012 prohibiting the use of climate science in certain state planning, yet that didn’t intimidate Hurricane Florence last month. And banning the words “climate change” isn’t helping Florida now.

Some folks will say this isn’t the moment for politics. But don’t we have a responsibility to mitigate the next disaster?

Prof. Michael E. Mann of Penn State told me that Hurricane Michael should be a wake-up call. “As should have Katrina, Irene, Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Florence,” he added wryly. “In each of these storms we can see the impact of climate change: Warmer seas means more energy to intensify these storms, more wind damage, bigger storm surge and more coastal flooding.”

Posted by: AGelbert

A pair of studies on wind power published last week are proving irresistible to mainstream reporters and deniers alike because of a seemingly counterintuitive conclusions: widespread use of wind power will cause warming.

Despite the headlines reflecting one of the press releases which claimed that “US wind power would cause warming,” the obvious fact iswind powerdoesn’t causeclimate change.

What it might do, according to the study, is mix up the air around the turbine and cause some localized warming as the turbines pull warmer air down.

Now, the study in question makes a ton of unrealistic assumptions, namely by modeling the impacts of what it would be like if %100 of US electricity is generated by wind. Considering that no one, anywhere, is calling for %100 wind, this is clearly not a “real-world” sort of modeling exercise.

But deniers, who loathe models when they say fossil fuels cause warming and that’s bad, were all too eager to promote this model-based study and decry the “major drawbacks” of the 100% wind system that literally no one is arguing in favor of.

Even still,📢greenhouse gasses trap heat, so the more we burn the warmer it gets.The warming from wind discussed here, though, isn’t adding any additional heat to the system.

Instead, it’s just moving it around from one place in the sky to another. Sort of like how a fan doesn’t exactly provide as much cooling power as an air conditioner, but it moves the air around in a way that makes it feel cooler. It’s like that, only in reverse. Turbines pull the warm air from higher up down, and push it around, displacing the cooler surface-level air and causing temperatures at ground level to rise.

This really isn’t all that complicated, but apparently is complex enough to lead to a bunch of unhelpful sounding headlines.

Now, sometimes, researchers are caught off guard when deniers distort their papers. In this case though, one of the authors told Business Insider that he had “no doubt that these results will be misconstrued and misinterpreted.”

So what’s the point? Well, as we look to moving off of fossil fuels, we do absolutely need to be aware of what potential pitfalls await in a renewably powered world. Knowing that there might be some additional warming around wind farms, then, is helpful for that long term planning.

And the study also points out that wind’s impact in this respect is 10 times larger than solar, suggesting that if we don’t take the ridiculous 100% wind path which no one thinks we will anyway, then the warming winds probably won’t make much of a difference.🕵️

The wind breaking up layers of warmth in the air may not be pleasant, but they’re no reason to keep passing gas off as the best energy source.

That the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page published dumb pieces over the weekend is hardly worth talking about. However, two of them, each in their own extra-special way, managed to accidentally tell some truth.

On Sunday, Paul Tice 🦕, investment manager, adjunct professor at NYU, anti-divestment advocate and Endangerment finding denier, wrote about how Trump's 🦀 rollback of the Clean Power Plan “will not change the trajectory of the coal industry.”

This, apparently, is a bad thing. Tice laments how various pro-renewable policies at the state level have been successful in lowering prices to the point where “excess renewable capacity has served to depress wholesale power prices and crowd out sources such as coal.” As a result, Tice explains, there hasn’t been a new coal plant built in the US in five years, and it would be risky for an executive to even propose one now.

Yes, renewables are replacing coal because they're cheaper. In Tice’s world, cleaner, cheaper energy that doesn't kill people at every stage of production is bad.

Blinded by ideology, Tice and the WSJ effectively admit that denier claims that renewables are too expensive are false. But it's likely ignorance, not ideology, that led to the WSJ's other accidental own-goal.

On Friday, WSJ columnist Holman Jenkins Jr. 🦖 penned a column that started out with some healthy both-siderism: Trump’s Maria denial is wrong, but apparently he’s not wrong about “many in the media” being biased for reporting those numbers. He then makes the Pielke-esque 🐉 argument that increased development on coasts is responsible for increased damages, not storms.

Jenkins defending Trump and parroting Pielke Jr. is hardly a surprise What is a surprise is where Jenkins went next.

When considering the cost of rebuilding after Florence, Jenkins asks how money should be spent so the government funding doesn’t “become an artificial incentive to live and build in high-risk places,” like hurricane-prone coasts. Similarly, he dings the National Flood Insurance Program for being “a perverse subsidy for coastal development.”

Yes, conservative Jenkins , in the pages of the Wall Street Journal 💵 🎩 🍌 🏴‍ ☠️, is promoting an adaptation policy the climate community calls “managed retreat.” It's one of the most extreme possible policy options, ideally left for once all other mitigation options run out.

Planned retreat describes how as sea levels rise (and hurricanes intensify) there will come a point at which we should move communities away from the coasts instead of repeatedly evacuating and rebuilding after every disaster. Instead of sea walls and other adaptation measures, we instead abandon the billions of dollars of coastal real estate as it is gradually submerged by the rising seas.

Does Jenkins 🦖 know that this is an established, already happening, yet extreme and fatalistic, climate adaptation policy? Unlikely.

After describing this last-ditch climate adaptation policy, he rhetorically asks where Al Gore is, and baselessly accuses “the climate crowd” of being “enamored of coastal development.” Why would the climate crowd embrace putting more people in harm’s way? Because, claims Jenkins, that means more “victims of climate change” that are used “for the benefit of generating media coverage of climate politics.”

Is the climate crowd ignoring this issue? Hardly! On the same exact day Jenkins posted about the climate crowd ignoring managed retreat, WUWT criticized a climate scientist for talking about managed retreat.

Sounds like Jenkins is either terribly ignorant of climate policy options, or is just a liar feigning ignorance to make a partisan point.

Either way, the fact is that he presented a surprisingly solid argument for a relatively extreme climate adaptation measure, from a conservative perspective, in a conservative outlet.

If we ever get any support for climate action from deniers, it might only be by virtue of their ignorance.

California’s recent passage of a 100% clean energy bill, coupled with Jerry Brown’s 100% carbon-free executive order, certainly make California a climate leader. But in terms of public opinion, it’s hardly a radical position. Even polling commissioned by the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group, shows overwhelming public support for clean energy. EEI is a group that’s been working on its renewables-related messaging for years now--it hired a crisis communications manager back in 2016, and shortly after issued messaging guidance we used as the perfect example of how propaganda emulates ideals to undermine them.

Two years later, and EEI is still at it. Polling and message testing presented at the group’s recent board meeting was shared with Dave Roberts at Vox, and provides some surprising insight into renewable energy’s incredible popularity. According to the testing, 74% of Americans support using solar “as much as possible,” while 70% support a 100% renewable grid “in the near future.” And when presented with the utility industry’s weak excuses that renewables aren’t up to the job or require too much land, respondents were unswayed. One participant said simply that they “don’t want to hear him complain about how much work it will take” but rather “how the work would get done.”

Part of getting it done means paying for it, and cost is definitely the issue deniers used to attack California’s recent renewable policies. But according to the polling, that’s probably not going to be effective: 51% of participants said they think 100% renewables is a good idea even if it means a 30% increase in energy bills!

The energy issue isn’t the only place deniers are running into public opposition. Over at the EPA, the unpopularity of Trump’s deregulatory agenda is starting to make folks rethink some things.

No, they’re not rethinking the desirability of policies that kill Americans, but instead how to convince Americans that those policies are fine.

According to InsideEPA’s Dave Reynolds, Andrew Wheeler 😈 and Trump’s 🦀 EPA 🐉 will attempt to distract Americans from deadly regulatory rollbacks by focusing on “risk communication” and highlighting the EPA’s success in the past few decades (you know, before the Trump crew came into power).

Per Reynolds, this desperate bid to reframe a polluters-first agenda comes at least in part as a result of Gallup polling from March that shows 62% of people think the government isn’t doing enough to protect the environment, and that for the first time since the year 2000, over half of us are upset about the state of the environment.

Similar to EEI’s message testing, Gallup found three-quarters of Americans support stronger pollution controls and more government spending on solar and wind, while a majority say environmental protection should be a priority, even if it means risking economic growth. The jobs vs environment dichotomy may be false, but most people don’t care anyway--more money is useless if you can’t breathe. This certainly complicates the right wing message of justifying regulatory rollbacks with economic concerns.

In light of these stats, top agency officials at last month’s Environmental Council of the States suggested shifting their messaging to improvements made over the last 25 years. Instead of bragging about what great new steps the federal agency, and its state-based incarnations, will be taking, they’re instead going to turn to the past to remind people how far we’ve come in cleaning up pollution.

Apparently, since the Cuyahoga River is no longer regularly catching fire, people should be fine with the EPA backtracking on regulations, demonizing the exact sort of regulatory agenda that helped stop the river from catching fire.

Urging people to remember how bad things used to be before there were EPA regulations is only going to be a winning message if it’s not followed by “well, now we’re rolling back regulations like that!”

DIMITRI LASCARIS: This is Dimitri Lascaris, reporting for The Real News Network from Montreal, Canada.

Today we look at Hurricane Florence and two important issues that relate to this major event. One is the media’s coverage of the ties between climate change and hurricanes. Another is a story that demands media attention, how hurricane-caused spills from coal ash pits and hog manure ponds in North Carolina, which is in the path of the hurricane, could harm low income People of Color. Our guest is longtime climate journalist, Lisa Hymas, director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters and senior editor at Grist. She joins us from Washington, D.C. Thank you for joining us today, Lisa.

LISA HYMAS: Thank you for having me. Happy to be with you.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: So, Lisa, let’s start with something Media Matters and Public Citizen reported on last year. They found that major outlets dropped the ball while covering hurricanes. They often did not connect them to climate change, and after Hurricane Harvey, a devastating hurricane, two groups of scientists published studies that link the record breaking rainfall to climate change. Now scientists are warning of a similar pattern of rainfall and effects from climate change, and last year, your reporting revealed that the media’s lack of coverage on this connection was quite significant. Thus far in your view, have the media done a better job of covering Florence and its to global warming?

LISA HYMAS: Well, it’s been a mixed bag so far. I mean, you are definitely right that coverage last year was very poor, coverage that connected the devastating hurricanes that we saw to climate change. So, we here at Media Matters did an analysis of broadcast news coverage of Hurricane Harvey and found that both the ABC and NBC never once mentioned climate change in all of their coverage of Hurricane Harvey. And we found that they didn’t do much better on Irma or Maria either. And as you said, Public Citizen is another organization that has done some analysis on this, and they looked at TV coverage and radio and newspapers last year, major newspapers, and found that just four percent of the stories about last year’s hurricanes mentioned climate change.

So, that is much less coverage than this issue deserves. I mean, not every story about a hurricane needs to mention climate change, but we should be seeing a lot more explanation to Americans of the ways that climate change exacerbates hurricanes and makes them more dangerous. So, this year so far, we have seen some good coverage explaining how climate change is making hurricanes worse, and even making Hurricane Florence in particular worse. So, I’ve been encouraged by some of the coverage that I’ve seen in outlets like The Washington Post, but also some regional newspapers like The Baltimore Sun and The Miami Herald have been explaining this connection.

On the other hand, we’ve seen some bad work in this area. Particularly, I’ve been looking at what USA Today has been doing. So, the paper USA Today ran a decent editorial this week talking about the connections between climate change and hurricanes, but then they ran a couple of pieces on their editorial page that disputed the link. And one of one of them outright denied that climate science is a settled thing. And another piece that they published was by a known climate denier who argued, contrary to the science, that we can’t see any influence of climate change on hurricanes. So, I’m optimistic by the good coverage that I’m seeing, but we still have a ways to go.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: And you mentioned The Washington Post was one of the more responsible media outlets. Do you know how the readership of The Washington Post compares to USA Today? I would imagine that USA Today has a substantially larger readership. Is that fair?

LISA HYMAS: You know, I believe you’re right but I’m not actually sure.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Okay. Now let’s move on to the recently loosened rule on coal ash disposal. This was the first Obama-era EPA rule changed by new incoming acting head of the EPA Andrew Wheeler. This move saves power companies like Duke Energy in North Carolina millions of dollars. But as Duke University’s Avner Vengosh observed in terms of the environmental impacts of coal ash, scaling back requirements in particular could leave communities vulnerable to potential pollution. And he said, “We have clear evidence that coal ash ponds are leaking into groundwater sources.

The question is, has it reached areas where people use it for drinking water? We just don’t know. That’s the problem.” How do you assess this problem, and is there anywhere in the country where sufficient groundwater testing is taking place?

LISA HYMAS: That’s a good question. I mean, we’re really concerned and a lot of people are concerned right now about these coal ash pits in North Carolina in the path of the storm. Coal burning power plants create massive amounts of toxic waste and they’re stored oftentimes alongside rivers and waterways in these pits, or sometimes they’re called ponds, that oftentimes aren’t properly lined, they’re not properly covered. Even when there isn’t bad whether, they can leak into waterways. So, there’s a lot of worry right now that if there is substantial flooding, major winds, that could really contaminate water supplies.

I mean, one of the real problems here is that that is likely to hurt low-income folks the most. They’re the ones who tend to live near power plants. They don’t put power plants in rich neighborhoods, they tend to be located near low-income people and minority communities. And so, the media and public health officials definitely need to be watching whether there are spills that will affect drinking water supplies.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: And I understand another important aspect of this that you have been imploring the media to cover is hog farms and their impact on low-income communities of color in North Carolina. While some of the print press seem to be on top of one aspect of the story namely, the dangers of hog waste getting into local waterways, you bring up a part that they are missing, which could potentially have profound impacts on the type of pollution on People of Color, and also, the role of the Trump administration loosening of regulations that could make these spills more likely.

North Carolina is home to thirty-one coal ash pits that house around, as I understand it, one hundred and eleven million tons, a stunning amount, of toxic waste produced by hogs. These ponds store about ten billion pounds of waste. Now, with the heavy rain from Hurricane Florence, this creates, as you call, it a “noxious witch’s brew that might be headed into people’s homes and drinking water. Please elaborate a little bit about the nature of this threat and whether you think enough is being done both to deal with the threat and to cover the threats, to make the public aware of the threat.

LISA HYMAS: Yeah, so you’re are exactly right. I’ve been glad to see that some outlets in the past few days have written about the danger of spills from hog manure waste pits as well as coal ash pits, but none of them have been picking up on the environmental justice angle and the people who will be hurt the most by this. Just as power plants tend to be located by low-income and minority communities, so do hog facilities.

So, North Carolina is home to many, many industrial hog facilities. You might call them factory farms, or the industry calls them concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs, but factory farms pretty much captures it. So, you have huge numbers of hogs in small confined spaces, and they produce massive amounts of waste. And that waste is, again, like the coal ash, oftentimes stored in pits that aren’t properly protected, that can overflow near waterways. And that waste is really noxious stuff that could have serious impacts on water quality.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: As most of the nation’s scientific community has expressed, extreme weather patterns appear to be on the rise. And as California’s governor Jerry Brown discusses, his state’s devastating wildfires are the new normal. North Carolina appears to have seen it a little differently in 2012, when the GOP-controlled state legislative body passed a law banning state officials from considering the latest science regarding sea level rise when doing coastal planning. The law was drafted in response to an estimate by the state’s Coastal Resources Commission that sea level will rise by thirty-nine inches in the next century, prompting fears of costly were home insurance and alarm from many quarters.

But residents and developers in the state’s coastal Outer Banks region pushed the bill, signed by a Republican Governor, saying, “if science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal.” I’m sorry, that actually was a comment by Stephen Colbert, not by the Republican governor. However, as you write, the problem is not solved. Will Hurricane Florence and the pro-environmental Democrat Roy Cooper, who was elected governor in 2016, in your view, be able to mute the influence of developers and Republican majority legislature in that state? How does this become something that we solve in North Carolina given the political realities?

LISA HYMAS: I think it’s going to be a challenge. I mean, you’re right to contrast California, which is really pushing ahead and trying to prepare for climate change and trying to fight climate change, with a state like North Carolina, where they really have been trying to move backward and pretend that climate science doesn’t even exist. I’ll be curious to see whether Hurricane Florence has some influence on that. When people’s homes are damaged or destroyed and their lives are affected and their communities are hurt, sometimes they can get a new view on things and maybe come to realize that climate change isn’t just an idle threat, but it’s something that’s already happening right now to communities.

So, I am hopeful that North Carolina can start moving in a more realistic direction, both preparing for climate change and fighting it, but we we will have to see. They don’t have a great record so far.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Well, we’ve been speaking to Lisa Hymas about Hurricane Florence, the media’s coverage of this major weather event and its connection to climate change, and the political rallies in North Carolina. Thank you very much for joining us today, Lisa.

LISA HYMAS: Thank you for having me on, it’s been great to talk to you.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: And this is Dimitri Lascaris, reporting for The Real News.

Posted by: AGelbert

A decade after pledging to end its support for climate science deniers, ExxonMobil gave $1.5 million last year to 11 think tanks and lobby groups that reject established climate science and openly oppose the oil and gas giant's professed climate policy preferences, according to the company's annual charitable giving report released this week.

Nearly 90 percent of ExxonMobil's 2017 donations to climate science denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and three organizations that have been receiving funds from the company since it started bankrolling climate disinformation 20 years ago: the American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute and American Legislative Exchange Council, which—in a surprise move—ExxonMobil recently quit. (More on that later.)

The other ExxonMobil denier grantees last year were the Center for American and International Law ($23,000), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000), National Taxpayers Union Foundation ($40,000), and Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).

ExxonMobil's funding priorities belie the company's purported support for a carbon tax, the Paris climate agreement and other related policies, which it reaffirmed in a January blog post by its public affairs director, Suzanne McCarron. If, as McCarron claims, ExxonMobil is "committed to being part of the solution," why is the company still spending millions of dollars a year on groups that are a major part of the problem?

ExxonMobil's History of Deceit

There is ample evidence that Exxon was fully aware of the danger its products pose to the planet since the 1980s and likely even earlier. Nonetheless, the company helped initiate a fossil fuel industry-backed climate disinformation campaign in 1998, a year before it merged with Mobil.

The company's behind-the-scenes role went largely unnoticed for nearly a decade, but in early 2007, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) revealed that it had spent at least $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to fund a network of more than 40 think tanks and advocacy groups to manufacture doubt about climate science under the guise of being neutral, independent analysts.

In response to the negative press generated by the UCS report, ExxonMobil vowed in its 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report to "discontinue contributions [in 2008] to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner."

Note that the company only promised to stop funding several policy groups, not all, and it did in fact drop some high-profile grantees, including the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and Institute for Energy Research. But it never completely ended its support for the disinformation network. From 1998 to 2007—the year of the pledge—it spent nearly $23 million on it. From 2008 through last year, it spent another $13.17 million, for a total of $36.13 million over the last 20 years. As far as anyone has been able to determine from publicly available data, only Charles and David Koch, the multibillionaire owners of Koch Industries, have spent more to deceive the public about climate science and block government action on climate change.

Last year, $1.35 million of the $1.5 million ExxonMobil spent went to the following four organizations:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce 😈: Sponsoring Slanted Studies

In 2014, ExxonMobil committed to give $5 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Capital Campaign in $1 million-a-year increments on top of its annual dues, despite the lobby group's history of misrepresenting climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year, the company kicked in another $15,000 for the Chamber's Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total donation to $1,015,000.

If one takes ExxonMobil's climate policy claims at face value, the Chamber's positions are polar opposite.

ExxonMobil has been very vocal about its support for the Paris climate agreement, for example, and during its former CEO Rex Tillerson's brief stint as U.S. secretary of state, he reportedly implored President Trump to keep the U.S. in it. What did Trump cite last year when he announced he was pulling out of the accord? A widely debunked report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Cosponsored by a former ExxonMobil grantee—the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF)—the report maintained that the Paris accord would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades and eliminate 6.5 million industrial sector jobs by 2040.

According to analyses by the Associated Press (AP), Politifact and The Washington Post, however, the Chamber and ACCF cooked the books. As the AP put it: "The study makes worst-case assumptions that may inflate the cost of meeting U.S. targets under the Paris accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to U.S. businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects."

American Enterprise Institute 😈: Undue Faith in the Market

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an 80-year-old free-market think tank in Washington, DC, has received more from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2017, ExxonMobil gave AEI $160,000, bringing its total to $4.49 million since 1998.

Economist Benjamin Zycher, the only AEI staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, rejects mainstream climate science, insists a carbon tax would be "ineffective," and has called the Paris agreement an "absurdity." He not only disagrees with ExxonMobil's professed climate policy positions, he has attacked the company for taking them.

Zycher's colleague Mark Thiessen, a regular contributor to The Washington Post, also dismisses the Paris accord, maintaining that "free enterprise, technology, and innovation—not pieces of parchment signed in Paris and Kyoto—will revolutionize how we produce and consume energy." Never mind that it often takes regulations to drive innovation and force corporations to adopt cleaner technology. Without federally mandated air pollution controls, for example, power plants and other industrial facilities would be emitting considerably more toxic pollution than they do today.

Manhattan Institute 😈: Propaganda Masquerading as News

Another free-market think tank, the Manhattan Institute, received $115,200 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, it has received $1.25 million. Like Zycher and Thiessen at AEI, Manhattan Institute fellows oppose a carbon tax and the Paris accord.

Earlier this year, the New York City-based organization hired longtime TV newsman John Stossel, former host of Fox Business Network's Stossel and ABC's 20/20, to interview Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Oren Cass for a slickly produced, 4-minute YouTube segment titled The Overheated Costs of Climate Change.

Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, told Stossel that the Paris climate agreement "was somewhere between a farce and a fraud." Stossel wholeheartedly agreed. "The Earth is warming," Stossel intoned in his wrap-up. "Man may well be increasing that. But the solution isn't to waste billions by forcing emissions cuts here while other countries do nothing. Well, pretend to make cuts. Trump was right to repudiate this phony treaty."

Waste billions while other countries do nothing? Besides the fact that it is now cheaper to produce electricity from utility-scale solar and wind energy in the U.S. than nuclear, coal and even natural gas, as of last November—a year after the Paris agreement officially went into effect—China, India and other major carbon emitters were already making significant progress in meeting their Paris accord commitments.

The other glaring problem with the segment is it's a prime example of fake news. With a former network news show host playing anchor, viewers could easily mistake the piece as a clip from of a legitimate newscast. At least one member of the conservative echo chamber treated it that way. The Washington Free Beacon, an online news organization funded by GOP megadonor Paul Singer, ran a news story about the Stossel-Cass interview on March 19.

On July 12, ExxonMobil announced it had ended its longtime membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council after a disagreement over the corporate lobby group's climate policy. From 1998 through last year—when Exxon Mobil reported it gave the group $60,000—ALEC 😈 received $1.93 million from the oil company.

Over the last two decades, ALEC has routinely featured climate science deniers at its conferences and supplied state lawmakers with a range of fossil fuel industry-drafted sample legislation, including bills that would restrict investment in renewables, eliminate incentives for electric vehicles, and hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to residential and business customers.

Since 2012, more than 100 corporations, including BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and electric utilities Entergy, Pacific Gas & Electric and Xcel Energy, have severed ties with ALEC, in many cases because of its regressive policy positions.

ExxonMobil's exit from ALEC came just months after the company fought to defeat a draft resolution sponsored by the Heartland Institute—an ExxonMobil grantee from 1998 through 2006—calling on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to "reopen and review" its "flawed" conclusion that climate change poses a threat to human health. The EPA's "endangerment finding" requires the agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions as hazardous pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

After ExxonMobiland the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a utility trade group, objected to the resolution, the Heartland Institute 😈 withdrew it and accused the two of being in league with the likes of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.

"Big corporations like ExxonMobil and trade groups like EEI have long been members of the discredited and anti-energy global warming movement," Heartland's president, Tim Huelskamp 👹, said in a Dec. 7 press release. "They've put their profits and 'green' virtue signaling above sound science and the interests of their customers."

Huelskamp's ludicrous assertion notwithstanding, some might construe ExxonMobil's exit from the American Legislative Exchange Council as a welcome change in direction. The company's money trail, however, clearly shows that it is still financingclimate science denier groups that denigrate any and all climate policy options and provide cover for Congress and the current administration to do nothing. Until ExxonMobil stops funding these groups, its avowed support for a carbon tax, the Paris agreement and other climate initiatives can't be seen as anything more than a cynical PR ploy.

Posted by: AGelbert

Trump Admin 🦕😈🦖👹: Driving Efficient Cars is Bad For You: As part of its effort to roll back fuel economy standards, the Trump administration plans to argue that improved gas mileage for cars and trucks would be more dangerous for drivers, the AP reported Wednesday. A draft of the administration's long-anticipated proposal to freeze fuel efficiency standards, seen by the AP, posits that freezing the standards could prevent up to 1,000 deaths per year, since less efficient and heavier cars would prevent people from driving more. "To say that safety is a direct result of somehow freezing the fuel economy mandate for a few years, I think that’s a stretch," Giorgio Rizzoni, director of the Center for Automotive Research at Ohio State University, told the AP. Transportation is the largest single source of air pollution in the country, and research last year found that even small increases in pollution correlated to more than 100,000 additional deaths among elderly populations. The proposal, which could be released as soon as this week, also contains plans to challenge California's ability to set its own standards, the AP reports.

Posted by: AGelbert

Not sure if you've heard, but there’s a new cult in town. It’s run by teenagers who want climate justice and a livable future. Sounds scary!

Zero Hour 🌎 is a climate group led by youth of color from different parts of America. Understanding that combating climate change requires urgent action, they recently released an ambitious platform of demands that outlines what different levels of the government must do in order to safeguard their future. Last Saturday, they held marches across the country, which received overwhelming support from parents, scientists, celebrities, politicians and other climate groups.

But not, surprisingly from the shrinking tribe of climate deniers 🙉 🙊 🦕🦖 . The planet's actually really cold, schooled a few anonymous experts. It’s a hoax, yelled others. What snowflakes, said some others who clearly like being original.

In response to the youth's brave stand last weekend, the denier blogger community mainly screamed back that teenagers are being brainwashed, exploited and indoctrinated to believe lies about climate change. (We’ve heard those talking points before. Remember the shameful piece in the Federalist about children victimized by gun violence?)

Watts Up With That featured a guest post (or rather two lines followed by copy-pasted content) complaining that “climate indoctrination” begins at a very young age.

Ed Straker 🦕 from American Thinker wrote a blog post to share his belief that Zero Hour is a doomsday cult with a “militantly brainwashed doomsday leftist” leader. Apparently, Straker is very scared of 16-year-old founder Jamie Margolin. Margolin, Straker writes,"may seem young, but never forget that many of the Red Guards in Mao's China who committed unspeakable atrocities were young, too.” Straker never gets around to really explaining how Zero Hour is a cult, but does complain that Margolin doesn’t smile enough. (Again, very original stuff.)

Fire up your tiny violins for Straker's next complaint: he notes that the group doesn’t appear to be led by men, especially white men. “Are boys not as easily brainwashed as girls?” he wonders. (We're...not going to touch that one.)

But easily the most prolific hater of the youth climate march was blogger Tom Nelson 😈, who repeatedly barraged the Zero Hour teen team with denier tweets, calling them brainwashed, a scam and BS, anti-science, and so much more. He 🦖 even gloated that there was low turnout as videos showed the youth resiliently rallying and marching in the pouring rain. We've got a sneaking hunch Nelson might have been a big old bully in high school the way he keeps attacking these teens.

Fossil fuels (all of them!) are the energy of the past. With new technologies like wind, solar, and advanced batteries in our hands, we can power today and tomorrow with clean, reliable energy that doesn’t harm our health and destroy our planet.

Natural gas is a growing energy source – one many are putting a lot of faith in.

Proponents like to portray the fuel as a cuddlier cousin to coal and oil when it comes to climate because it generates less carbon dioxide when burned. But its CO2 emissions are only one piece of a far more nuanced puzzle.

Many of the arguments in support of natural gas are based on outdated or incorrect information – sometimes going so far as to border on wishful thinking. That’s why we’re setting the record straight on some of the most common myths about natural gas and our climate.

Natural GasWill Not Solve The Climate Crisis

When people make this argument, they’re (mostly) referring to one thing, in particular, that is indeed true of natural gas: a new, efficient natural gas power plant emits around 50 percent less carbon dioxide (CO2) during combustion when compared with a typical coal-based power plant, according to the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL).

To be sure, we should take seriously any source of energy that reduces our dependence on coal and oil, the primary sources of the carbon emissions that drive climate change. But let’s also engage in some real talk: 50 percent less CO2 also isn’t zero CO2, and CO2 isn’t the only harmful emission generated by natural gas development.

We’re still talking about a fossil fuel here, one that still contributes to climate change when burned. And achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the second half of this century is essential to the long-term health of our planet.

That number also doesn’t take into account all of the carbon emissions that happen across the full life cycle of natural gas, particularly during extraction, infrastructure construction, transport, and storage. But rather than dwell, let’s just get straight to the real climate Big Bad when it comes to natural gas – methane.

Methane is a very, very powerful greenhouse gas. In the atmosphere, compared to carbon, it’s fairly short-lived: only about 20 percent of the methane emitted today will still be in the atmosphere after 20 years. However, when it first enters the atmosphere, it’s around 120 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat and 86 times stronger over a 20 year period.

(Carbon dioxide hangs around for much longer: As much as 15 percent of today’s carbon dioxide will still be in the atmosphere in 10,000 years.)

And a lot of the methane that ends up in the atmosphere comes from natural gas production.

“The drilling and extraction of natural gas from wells and its transportation in pipelines result in the leakage of methane,” Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) notes. “Preliminary studies and field measurements show that these so-called ‘fugitive’ methane emissions range from 1 to 9 percent of total life cycle emissions.”

(When we talk about “total life-cycle emissions,” we’re talking all emissions from the source, including those leaked during its extraction, transportation, and more, and not just what is emitted when a fuel source is burned to create energy.)

If you’re thinking, “The difference between 1 and 9 percent is a pretty big deal,” you’re absolutely right. It’s also an exceptionally important metric when talking about the relative value of natural gas in the climate fight. For a natural gas power plant to have lower extraction of natural gas than a coal plant (as proponents keep claiming is the benefit), the entire system’s methane leakage must be kept below 3.2 percent.

Natural GasIs Not Environmentally Friendly

We need to be very clear here: Natural gas is not a clean form of energy. Cleaner than coal? Sure – but that’s not saying a heck of a lot. Clean like solar or wind? Get out of here!

To start, the extraction process is rife with potential problems. Much of our natural gas comes through the process of hydraulic fracturing – aka “fracking.” In this process, companies drill boreholes deep into the earth and inject liquid into the subterranean rock at very high pressure. This forces open rock fissures and release gas from within the rock or reservoirs below.

In particular, fracking can contaminate groundwater supplies if it’s not done properly.

Fracked gas is typically found pretty deep in the earth – much further down than the water table. But the boreholes carrying the gas back up to the surface travel straight through the water-bearing rocks, called aquifers, from which many of us get our water. The injected fracking fluid often contains dangerous chemicals that no one would want to drink – and if the borehole is not properly cased, those chemicals can escape into groundwater.

And it’s important to remember that natural gas development is itself far from pollution-free.

“Some areas where drilling occurs have experienced increases in concentrations of hazardous air pollutants and two of the six criteria pollutants — particulate matter and ozone plus its precursors — regulated by the EPA because of their harmful effects on health and the environment,” the Union of Concerned Scientists reports. “Exposure to elevated levels of these air pollutants can lead to adverse health outcomes, including respiratory symptoms, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.”

Exposure to these pollutants can be particularly damaging to very young children.

“Given the profound sensitivity of the developing brain and the central nervous system, it is very reasonable to conclude that young children who experience frequent exposure to these pollutants are at particularly high risk for chronic neurological problems and disease,” the Center for Environmental Health’s Ellen Webb, a researcher on the neurological and neurodevelopmental effects of chemicals linked to unconventional oil and gas operations, told the Guardian last year.

Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere

The conversation over natural gas’ value as a “bridge fuel” is a fraught one. Supporters claim that it’s a better alternative to coal that will carry us until renewables like wind and solar can fully power the grid. But let us ask you this: Would you take a bridge at all if there was no river, ravine, or other obstacle you had to cross?

That’s to say, we already have zero or near-zero carbon-emitting energy sources that are preferable to coal, oil, and natural gas. Residential and utility-scale wind, solar, and geothermal energy are up and running and getting better every day – and they’re increasingly cost-competitive with energy produced by fossil fuels. Right now.

Yale Climate Connections makes the stakes plain: “Although it might not be practical to replace all coal plants with renewables immediately, it’s definitely possible to do so in the next decade if renewables continue to fall in price.”

The article goes on to highlight the real danger of the bridge fuel fallacy: “If we replace coal with gas today, we’ve sunk costs into new gas infrastructure that we might be loath to replace a few years later with renewables. In this way, a gas bridge could delay the widespread adoption of renewables.”

The bottom line is that natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and simply shifting from coal to it won’t keep the US on track to meet its emissions reduction goals, even if methane leakages are reined in.

So rather than make an unnecessary, temporary wholesale switch to natural gas, the smarter tactic would be to phase out coal while moving straight to utility-scale renewable energy – something that is totally doable.

Listen, we get it: Fossil fuels helped power the Industrial Revolution and helped shape the past two centuries. But they’re just that – the energy of the past. With new technologies like wind, solar, and advanced batteries in our hands, we can power today and tomorrow with clean, reliable energy that doesn’t harmour health and destroy our planet.

One of the largest myths about addressing climate change is that transitioning to renewable energy from fossil fuels (especially coal) will create a net loss of American jobs.

However, renewable energy is doing the opposite of putting Americans out of work. The New York Times reported that in 2016 coal was responsible for 160,119 jobs. In contrast solar employed more than double that amount (373,807 Americans).

The number of renewable jobs is also expected to grow significantly in the coming years. Last year, Business Insider reported that “solar and wind jobs are growing at a rate 12 times as fast as the rest of the US economy and… 46% of large firms have hired additional workers to address issues of sustainability over the past two years.”

In addition to renewables' contribution to overall employment in the United States, there are a number of other economic benefits to American workers when we encourage growth in the renewable energy industry:

Geographic DistributionWhile fossil fuel jobs tend to be concentrated in a few states (the vast majority of jobs in coal exist in West Virginia or Wyoming.), renewable energy jobs are spread out around the country. Program Director Liz Delaney at the Environmental Defense Fund points out that “These jobs [in the renewable energy sector] are widely geographically distributed, they're high paying, they apply to both manufacturing and professional workers, and there are a lot of them.”

Supporting and encouraging the renewable energy industry will help hundreds of thousands of Americans find jobs all across the country. These are not simply installation jobs either, maintenance is a large part of the renewable energy industry.

Small Businesses

Environmental Defense Fund Program Director Delaney also mentions that “70% of the 2.2 million Americans who work in jobs related to energy efficiency are employed by companies with 10 employees or fewer.” These are small businesses, hiring American workers, in one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy. In addition, according to Delaney these jobs are also more difficult to outsource because “many sustainability jobs involve installation, maintenance, and construction.” The renewable energy sector is encouraging small business development in America.

Ultimately, encouraging the development of the renewable energy sector is the best path forward for America. Concerns about lost jobs in the fossil fuel and coal industries are legitimate and important to recognize, but those lost jobs should not hinder progress towards a renewable future. This is why training programs should be encouraged to support fossil fuel workers move to other sectors or be trained in budding renewable technology. The New York Times reports that “In Wyoming, home to the nation’s most productive coal region by far, the American subsidiary of a Chinese maker of wind turbines is putting together a training program for technicians in anticipation of a large power plant it expects to supply. And in West Virginia, a nonprofit outfit called Solar Holler… is working with another group, Coalfield Development, to train solar panel installers and seed an entire industry.” These successful test cases demonstrate that America can work towards renewable energy while also supporting and training workers to transition from fossil fuels to renewables in the same way that America is transitioning.

The claim that renewable energy is a job killer or a drain on our economy is a myth, perpetrated by the fossil-fuel business 🦖 😈 👹 and the politicians 🐒 who do their bidding. Don't fall for it.Renewable energy is the path forwardfor American jobs and the future of our planet.

Posted by: AGelbert

David Armiak, PR Watch: Bradley Foundation internal documents reviewed by the Center for Media and Democracy reveal a concerted effort by the organization to delegitimize climate science while promoting fossil fuel energy development in the United States.

Posted by: AGelbert

So Close, Yet Still So Far from Reality: Two Deniers Almost Tell the Truth

Denial is never scientifically accurate, but sometimes it’s close. While we enjoy the relative ease of dunking on the obviously wrong, today we’re going to be a little nicer, and look at a couple of examples of deniers 🦕 🦖 who got oh so very close to being right.

Both, oddly enough, are by folks associated with local chapters of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC 🦕), which has received funding from Heartland🦖.

First up: a piece by Viv Forbes 🦕, a career coal guy affiliated with the Australian version of ICSC, published this week in the American Thinker. Forbes argues that the “climate alarm media” misses long-term trends of climate by focusing on short-term weather events. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of reality, but in making this counterfactual point, Forbes lays out a fairly factual description of the natural cycles of the climate system.

Unfortunately for Forbes, he manages to totally gloss over the fact that these natural cycles take hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, while the warming humans are causing can be felt in just decades. Forbes’s insistence that human carbon pollution can’t offset the next looming ice age is cold comfort for anyone but readers in the year 3100.

The second is an essay by Steve Goreham 🦖, a public speaker, Heartland policy advisor and leader of the Climate Science Coalition of America (CSCA) 😈 👹, which is the US arm of the aforementioned ICSC. The piece first appeared in the far right fake news and hate factory WND, then made its way to the Daily Caller, then finally to Heartland’s website

Like Forbes, Goreham flirts with the truth but ends up missing the mark by encouraging his audience to stop saying humans “contribute to climate change.” Goreham complains that from keeping housecats to exhaling, “every human activity contributes to climate change.”

Goreham’s description of the climate system is surprisingly scientifically accurate, touching on the influence of the oceans and aerosols and the like. Even his main point isn’t technically wrong: he argues that water vapor is the “dominant” greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and that there’s more natural CO2 in the atmosphere than there is from human activity. Goreham therefore concludes that since everything contributes to climate change, not just humans, the term is meaningless and people should stop using it.

We don’t tend to agree with folks we feature here, but Goreham’s not wrong. It’s much more accurate and simple to say that human activity, spec ifically burning fossil fuels, is not contributing to, but causing climate change. We’re responsible for it. We are to blame for it. It’s our fault.

Thanks, Steve! You’re right, just… not in the way you 🦖 meant to be.

Posted by: AGelbert

Agelbert NOTE: This is the final portion of a post where I address Surly, an Admin at the Doomstead Diner. I have basically had it with Surly's soft spot for the Palloy "Peak Oil caused collapse will save us" hydrocarbon worshiping propagandist BULLSHIT ARTIST.

Palloy mixes hard facts with bullshit seamlessly and you get your drawers in a bunch every time I expose the arrogant bastard for what he truly is!

After the defamatory CRAP he pulled on Dr. Brown, all you could come up with is some lame request for "proof", which he DID NOT PROVIDE, by the way, and you left it right there, rather than ask me if that constituted "proof" (which it did NOT), after putting me in the exact same "don't Ad hom" scolded at position as the routinely defamatory Palloy PEDANT.

I will NO LONGER TOLERATE you coming after me for alleged AD Hominem towards Palloy. I told you loud and clear what a dangerous F U C K he is in PMs. He is pushing a meme that will kill ALL of us, and you, like Palloy, are too bound up in your belief that a lack of hydrocarbons caused collapse will come before environmental catastrophe caused collapse to see that.

Allowing an ASS HOLE like Palloy to keep parading his pseudo-erudite BULLSHIT continually is a testament to EVERYONE HERE's incredibly STUPID world view that is contributing to the AGE OF (hydrocarbon loving) STUPID that is DOOMING human civilization.

GET OFF your "hydrocarbons are needed for civilization" STUPID VIEW, Surly. It IS STUPID.

I think it likely that the remaining hegemons will say -- time to withdraw to the Western Hemisphere (except maybe keep the sea lanes open to Nigerian and Angolan oil). If so, then I think the West has better long-term prospects than the East.

I hope you are right. But the MO of the goons (with a CONSISTENT historical track record) in charge that you are totally ignoring makes your wish look more like a prayer than a serious possibility.

THE MO of the neocon has a LONG history. As a scholar, you probably know it better than I do but you JUST DO NOT WANT TO GO THERE. It's time you did.

Let me refresh your memory on how this works:

Richard Nixon was the first (in our country - as far as I know) to espouse the policy of acting super belligerent and crazy as a foreign policy tactic. The purpose is to intimidate the other nation into acting "reasonable" and acceding to our predatory corporate demands RATHER THAN BEING DESTROYED. You need to convince the other nation that you will gladly go beyond the brink even if your economy will be hampered by it! This BULLY policy has gotten more polished but it's still the same basic MO. Look up some quotes from the Republican speaker of the house (Gingrich). He said NEVER back down. When an opponent attempts to negotiate a settlement agreeable to both, DOUBLE DOWN on the threats. Never admit fault. Never go on the defensive. Always remain on the offensive. THAT is the MO that you want to pretend does not DOMINATE US foreign policy.

The problem with that type of MO is that it leads to WAR if the other party does not back down. It has worked BECAUSE it has been used on WEAK countries for the past few decades. If you think Russia is going to back down here, you just do not understand the situation.

Russia, by the way, STILL has complete underground cities and an extensive plan to survive (as well as possible under the circumstances - they KNOW how to grow food in sealed areas - they did a multiyear study to simulate a closed food system on mars) a full scale nuclear attack. Have you forgotten that?

The people doing this in our country have LOST IT. They aren't PRETENDING to be crazy. They have GONE CRAZY! It's called megalomania born of too many monstrous "successes" like Iraq and 9/11.

It happened in Germany before WWII. We are there. Only some smart people that can counter them INSIDE our government will avoid WWIII. The neocons BELIEVE, like the crazies Reagan spoke about in the 1980s (you've got to be pretty crazy to be to the right of Reagan!) that "we" can win a nuclear war. They will NOT EVER accept a multi-polar world. That's the reality. We are all in danger as long as they are commanding our government sponsored terrorism.

All that said, I envy your ability to pretend all this is an illusion. That means your stress hormones are probably lower than mine and you will never have heart disease from stress.

I wish it was an illusion. I don't think so. I remember how you claimed Fossil fuels had NOT gamed the playing field against renewable energy in the 1980s as if dirty energy actually WON the cost competition in those days. I gave you all sorts of circumstantial evidence but since it wasn't in the New York Times, I guess you remained unconvinced.

Watch this two minute tape. Accept EVERYTHING on it as true. If you don't, then watch the entire video the clip comes from and you WILL see the evidence for yourself. You were wrong to think fossil fueldom did not screw us back then and continues to screw us now. These people are not stupid; they are evil. But I agree that if this is all an illusion, it does not really matter...

Fossil Fuel Government 2 minute Video Clip FULL VIDEO, "The Age of Stupid":

Surly, if you are too enthralled with your concept of "freedom of speech" to see how SUICIDALLY STUPID it is to allow assholes like Palloy to claim the greater problem for human civilization is the "lack of energy from the lack of hydrocarbons", then you, like Palloy, are part of the problem and I am in the wrong forum.

Five scientists analyzed the article and estimate its overall scientific credibility to be 'low'.

A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Cherry-picking, Misleading.

SCIENTISTS’ FEEDBACK

This opinion published by the Financial Post, written by economist Ross McKitrick, claims that Earth’s climate is much less sensitive to additions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide than climate scientists think. The article further claims that global warming is, therefore, not an important problem—and may even be beneficial.

Scientists who reviewed the article found that this argument is misleading, and relies on ignoring all but a select few of the many studies that exist on this topic. These studies use a particular method for estimating this “equilibrium climate sensitivity” that other research has shown to be problematic. An informed opinion should consider all the scientific lines of evidence available instead of picking the ones that agree with the author’s predetermined conclusion. Taken together, that evidence does not support the article’s argument.

These comments are the overall opinion of scientists on the article, they are substantiated by their knowledge in the field and by the content of the analysis in the annotations on the article.

Reto Knutti, Professor, ETH Zürich:This is an opinion piece in the “lukewarm” category, arguing that climate models are wrong, future warming will be small, based on carefully selected publications, misleading presentation, and incorrect reporting of the underlying data.

This opinion piece is a completely one-sided and misleading representation of what we know about the long-term response of temperature to greenhouses gases.

Zeke Hausfather, Research Scientist, Berkeley Earth:This article selectively cherry-picks studies showing low climate sensitivity, leaving out whole lines of evidence (e.g. paleoclimate studies) that agree with the sensitivity estimates found in models. It also glosses over the many criticisms of instrumentally based (or “energy balance”) sensitivity estimates published in recent years.

Patrick Brown, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science:The article makes a big deal about the fact that some methods of estimating equilibrium climate sensitivity tend to give smaller results than others. This is not a new finding and it is not under appreciated in the climate science literature or by the IPCC. The methods for estimating climate sensitivity discussed in the article are already incorporated into the uncertainty ranges of climate sensitivity considered by the IPCC and other assessments. Overall, it is best practice to consider results from a full range of methods and to not focus on the single method that produces the lowest estimate of climate sensitivity.

Mark Zelinka, Research Scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:Rather than present the Lewis and Curry (2018) study in the context of the multitude of other estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity, the article shows only results from studies using similar approaches that confirm the claim in the title. Such energy budget approaches consistently underestimate climate sensitivity primarily because they rely on a conceptual model of forcing and response that is too simple for the problem at hand, as an explosion of recent literature on the topic has shown. This body of evidence is either dismissed out of hand or ignored entirely in the article.

Andrew Dessler, Professor, Texas A&M University:This paper misrepresents that state of science. It selectively quotes analyses that support the author’s opinion, while ignoring all contrary evidence. Putting all of the evidence together, there’s no reason to think that climate models are wrong.

Notes: [1] See the rating guidelines used for article evaluations. [2] Each evaluation is independent. Scientists’ comments are all published at the same time.

The statements quoted below are from the article; comments and replies are from the reviewers.

Quote

People who study the impacts of global warming have found that if ECS is low — say, less than two — then the impacts of global warming on the economy will be mostly small and, in many places, mildly beneficial. If it is very low, for instance around one, it means greenhouse gas emissions are simply not worth doing anything about.

Patrick Brown, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science:This passage is misleading. It seems to imply that society has already decided to exactly double CO2 concentrations and has committed to emitting no further greenhouse gasses after that. If that were the case, then we could in fact assess climate change impacts in the manner done here.

However, society is far from committing to stabilizing CO2 concentrations at “only” twice their preindustrial levels. We may go well beyond that. In that case, lower equilibrium climate sensitivity just means that it takes longer to reach a given level of warming. So even if climate sensitivity turns out to be very low, all the worst impacts could still be realized—they would just be delayed.

Quote

We may not be able to stop it, but we’d better get ready to adapt to it.

Patrick Brown, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science:The magnitude of equilibrium climate sensitivity has nothing to do with whether or not we can stop climate change. Global temperatures will stabilize when the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses stabilize. So regardless of the climate sensitivity value, we can “stop” climate change by stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations.